Lisa Kudrow: I’m A Protective Mom

Lisa Kudrow‘s supporting role in the new comedy Bandslam portrays a single mom who just wants her teenage son to fit in and find the right girl. In an interview with Parade, the 46-year-old Friends star opens up about her 11-year-old son Julian, her 14-year marriage with advertising exec Michael Stern, and the challenges of parenthood–and high school.

On being a protective mom: “It felt real and honest to play a parent who really keeps an eye on her son. It’s good to be protective, but tough figuring out when to let go and let your kid do his own thing. I’ve been trying to be a little more structured and have rules and boundaries for my own son and I’ve gotten better at it. But, I’d say my husband takes care of the discipline in our house.”

On welcoming Julian’s future girlfriends: “My son is a little young. We’ll see what happens after puberty, but he’s not there yet. I think I’ll be a cheerleader for his girlfriends, though. I can’t imagine him bringing home someone horrible.”On women with younger men: “My character is getting hit on by a 17-year-old. But it’s all his initiative, it’s not like this woman was trying to seduce him. That’s an important distinction. I would imagine it’s not easy being a cougar. Men age well and they are capable of being attractive to women that are a lot younger, and it just doesn’t work the other way most of the time.”

On her first kiss: “The actor, Ryan Donowho, is not 17. I’m happy to say he’s well over 21. That was like some consolation because I’m not into kissing teenagers. But I’ve done quite a bit of kissing in films. It’s not real, and maybe that’s why it’s fun for me. My first real kiss was terrible. It was in sixth grade, we were playing spin the bottle and I told the boy he wasn’t doing it right.”

On her husband being OK with love on-screen: “He knows that there’s no danger of me falling for someone on a whim. We’ve talked about that a lot. I don’t get crushes that easily. There’s a part of me that’s drawing a line. In your marriage, it’s about trust. Anyway, I wouldn’t leave my husband for anything or anyone. I understand what’s important.”

On her high school memories: “The thing I can’t forget is how I felt inside, which was miserable. There wasn’t anything really horrifying going on, I was just like, ‘I don’t fit in here, so I’ll just wait for my life to start. I’ll just have to wait a few years.’ My parents kept telling me not to worry. They were saying, ‘When you’re in college, that’s when it’s going to click.’ And they were right.”

On trying out for cheerleading in high school: “Early on in high school I did think that maybe I should try out for cheerleading because I wanted to see if that was a good fit for me, which it wasn’t. My friends certainly weren’t part of that football player-cheerleader crowd. We were into new wave music–not quite punk, not that angry. We’d wear thrift-shop clothes and go to clubs on Sunset Boulevard.”

On her first celebrity crush: “I started my own fan club for David Cassidy. I wrote away for photos and then I asked my girlfriends to come over after school and they each had to give me a nickel that would cover the cost of refreshments and photos. Mothers would drop their daughters off and say, ‘Thank you so much for doing this.'”

On why she tries to skip her own films: “I think it’s hard to watch yourself. Period. I don’t know if that’s a flaw of my own, but I don’t get too upset if I don’t look great. If I’m supposed to look great and I don’t look great, then that bothers me. On the other hand, if I’m not playing a glamorous character, I don’t care.”

On her next TV project: “It’s a genealogy series in which we take stars to their ancestral landmarks, you know, to different countries and places where they see documents and they see homes or buildings or things that have to do with their family and they learn something. We do have Sarah Jessica Parker, Susan Sarandon, and I did one. It’s basically a Holocaust story, to be honest. So there were details to uncover that were brutal and also surprising.”